File: Health workers during a physical TOT training on COVID-19 for frontline medical workers/ South Sudan Doctor's Union.

Several frontline healthcare workers have been isolated after they tested positive for the virus, the reconstituted national task force on coronavirus has said.

Some of the workers are believed to have contracted the coronavirus during contact tracing.

“Yeah some of them tested positive and they have since self-isolated, their contacts also have self-isolated,” the spokesperson for the taskforce, Dr. Makur Matur Koriom told Eye Radio on Tuesday.

“Well I know a couple of them but of course, the team was affected but the fact [is] that, their contacts have to isolate as well.”

But Dr. Makur could not disclose the number of health workers that have been affected by the virus.

Early this month, healthcare workers under their umbrella group, Doctors’ Union of South Sudan raised concerns over lack of Personal Protective Equipment for frontline workers as they fight the COVID-19 pandemic.

The International Council of Nurses said this month that it believed at least 90,000 healthcare workers had been infected and more than 260 nurses died in the novel coronavirus pandemic globally.

The council added that, failure by governments to record infection rates and deaths of healthcare staff “is a scandal that puts staff at higher risk” and underestimates the true scale of the problem.

It noted with concern that, failure to record both infection rates and deaths among healthcare workers is putting more nurses and their patients in danger.

The International Council of Nurses called on governments to immediately start keeping accurate records of infections and deaths among healthcare workers in their respective countries.

So far, no healthcare worker has been reported to have died of coronavirus in South Sudan.